THE TRANSPLANTATION OF OVARIES IN CHICKENS! 
C. B. DAVENPORT 
From Carnegie Institution of Washington: Station for Experimental Evolution 
Dr. C. C. Guthrie (’08) has reported the results of transplant- 
ing ovaries from black to white hens and vice versa. A black- 
plumaged hen furnished by transplantation with ‘white’ eggs and 
mated to a white cock gave ‘‘about equal numbers of white and 
spotted” chicks. Guthrie thinks that these black spots indicate 
that the black-plumaged foster-mother infected the engrafted 
‘white’ eggs. So far Guthrie. But a person familiar with the 
results of hybridizing will appreciate that Guthrie’s result is bet- 
ter explained on the assumption that the engrafted ovary was 
absorbed and that the white sperm fertilized the regenerated 
‘black’ eggs of the black hen. For the white by black cross gives 
white offspring with black spots in the female chicks only, 7.e., 
half of all, as Guthrie found. 
In a second set of experiments, Guthrie found that when a 
white hen carrying a ‘black’ ovary was mated to a White Leg- 
horn male, the offspring were either white or black or spotted. 
Guthrie says: “The black, therefore, must have come through the 
black ovary.” But the student of hybridization on poultry will 
recognize at once that, if the white-plumaged cock produced only 
‘white’ germ cells, none of his offspring would be black even if 
the eggs were ‘black.’ Hence, the cock must have had ‘black’ 
germ cells and, very likely, the hen also, since ‘White Leghorn’ 
hens that carry ‘black’ germ cells are very common and fre- 
quently show, in adult life, a pure white plumage. 
If two ‘White Leghorns’ with ‘black’ germ cells bemated expec- 
tation is that in four chicks one shall be black; one spotted, and 
1A preliminary paper covering these results was read before the Society for 
Experimental Biology and Medicine, June 1910. 
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